Anyone have a suggestion as to where to go when an external hard drive dies. Tried Staples without any luck. I really don’t want to lose all those images! But, I don’t want to pay hundreds trying to retrieve them either.
Help!
I had a client with a Western Digital hard drive that failed. Sent it to Western Digital data recovery and recovered most, but it won’t be cheap. Tell me you have at least 1 backup…
Same experience here. They recovered most of our data. Wasn’t cheap, but a comparatively small cost weighed against complete loss of the work.
Patricia
Sorry to hear you are having this issue! Just wanted to chime in that your images are worth a few hundred to save!!!
Now , reading this has reminded me I am way overdue on backups!
I hope you solve this
Kathy
As encouragement for more backups, we recently paid around $125/each for several WD 5-terabyte portables at Costco. My wife and I both are pretty manic about duplicate backups after our long-ago drive failure. An extra $125 for 5 terabytes of duplicate backups is chump change compared what we paid for storage 10 years ago. Frankly didn’t even know what a terabyte was in those days, and I can recall buying 300mb WD drives for about that price.
BTW- Duplicate backups are further insurance against theft or loss. We each carry two of the 5TB drives on trips, and before traveling home Fedex one apiece home.
@Patricia_Brundage You might want to take a look at data recovery apps. This would be much less expensive than sending to WD.
Take a look at Recuva Pro from Piriform, or, you can search for such an app–there are several out there.
-p
Speaking of Costco, many of the drives they are now selling come with two years of data recovery insurance. That makes the cost of a large storage drive even more valuable. Most drives sold at Costco come with a two-year warranty on the drive itself. Costco usually doubles the warranty time limit on many of its products.
Thanks for all your suggestions. I will check out data recovery and Costco options.
It’s quite possible that the hard drive itself is fine and the only thing not working is the external usb interface. It might be worth a try taking the drive out of the enclosure and connecting it to a computer internally.
Patricia, good luck with your data recovery. You have good suggestions above.
I just want to chime in about the importance of having a cloud backup as insurance when all else fails.